Hello Interwebs!
Two posts in as many days! I am doing quite well this week. I hope all of you are also well. I want to do a review for the first book I finished in October. That book is In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead. This is a fairly recently released thriller that has been all abuzz on YouTube and Goodreads and various other bookish communities. I read it from September 25th to October 7th and gave it a fine 3 star rating.
This book is about six college friends who reunite during their alma mater's homecoming and are confronted with the secrets of their pasts and the fact that one of them murdered another one of their friends on Valentine's Day their senior year.
To be completely frank this book was fine. Not great but also not terrible. The book jumps between the present day and then a decade plus ago when the friends were in college leading up to the murder of their friend, Heather. You get the story from the perspective of one of the group, Jessica Miller, who is desperate to be seen as confident and beautiful and the best, but who also doesn't remember much from the night Heather died. The back and forth time jumps made the story a little unnecessarily complex, especially since it didn't go straight through the college years but jumped back and forth through them. I also thing it was a little unnecessarily wordy and could've been consolidated a bit. That being said the ultimate solution was both a surprise but not surprising, which I like since it means that although I didn't figure out exactly who had killed Heather, it also wasn't so out of left field that it wasn't believable. I think a lot of my issue with this book was the fact that there was exactly no one who was likeable in it and so I didn't care about anyone and their ultimate fates. Except maybe Frankie...and possibly Jack, but mostly just Frankie. So there's my general thoughts about the book.
As always some spoilers abound past the cover pic.
So we follow this group of college friends dubbed the East House seven: Jessica, our narrator; Mint, her cocky rich boy boyfriend; Caro, the sweet best friend; Heather the charismatic popular girl, also our victim; Coop, the secret drug dealer; Frankie, the football star; and Jack, Heather's boyfriend. The book begins at homecoming when Heather's younger brother approaches the group of friends to memorialize Heather. Upon arriving to this private memorial they are confronted by Eric, who says the police were wrong in believing that Jack killed Heather and through his own investigation discovered it must be one of the others. Then the secrets start coming out. You have Frankie the secret gay guy who was messing around with Heather's boyfriend Jack, Jessica who was cheating on Mint with Coop, Caro who was lying to everyone, Coop who was in too deep with his drug suppliers, and Mint who was harboring a dark secret. Through the twists and turns of the novel more and more issues come out and it culminates during the homecoming parade where Mint confesses to murdering Heather, but only because she was nearly unconscious drunk and drugged and asleep in Jessica's bed. He'd intended to kill Jessica to get back at her for humiliating him by sleeping with her professor and made a mistake. He tries to kill them and Eric shoves him from the window. Jessica says it was her and it was self defense, a fact confirmed by her own wounds and they get off scot free on Mint's death and Heather's is finally solved. They all go their separate ways and Coop and Jessica end up leaving together...but not before we get a final shot of Jessica, remembering that Heather was still alive when she found her in her bed and she did nothing and let her die.
This book was dark and twisty and a decent thriller all in all. I think if I hadn't been so fresh off of Home Before Dark by Riley Sager, which is one of my all-time favorite thrillers I would've liked it better. It was fine, not one I will reread with any frequency but also not one I hate. I would recommend giving it a read, especially if you like books that have a dark academia vibe. All in all this was a solid 3/5 star book and one I'm not sorry I read.
Anyway that's my first finished book for October 2021, not a bad start but could've been better. Look for another book review soon.
Happy Reading!
Richelle
No comments:
Post a Comment